THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 19
ers who foot the bills are the have-nots,”
he said. Then, in February, 2011, he an-
nounced a law that gutted collective-
bargaining rights for public employees
and reduced their health-insurance and
pension benefits. The law, which became
known as Act 10, led to protests at the
state capitol that at times drew a hun-
dred thousand people.
Katherine Cramer, a political scientist
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
spent eight years interviewing rural Wis-
consinites for her book “The Politics
of Resentment,” published months be-
fore Trump’s election. “I heard so many
complaints about teachers,” she told
me. “‘How is it that they can get off of
work? People who really work hard don’t
have time to go out and protest.’” Act 10
prompted a recall petition, which gath-
ered more than a million signatures, but
Walker won the recall election, nearly
sweeping the Driftless Area. He was
reëlected two years later, with strong
support from the region. In 2012, Walker
announced a plan to increase Wiscon-
sin’s milk production to thirty billion
pounds a year by 2020. The goal was met
four years early, but the increase con-
tributed to a collapse in prices and the
further consolidation of dairy farming.
Compounding the economic anxiety,
a month before the 2016 Presidential elec-
tion, Wisconsinites learned that their
Obamacare rates would increase by an
average of sixteen per cent. Rural resi-
dents were hit particularly hard, because
they are less likely to have employer-spon-
sored health insurance. Trump seized on
the underlying discontent, staging five
large rallies in Wisconsin during the cam-
paign, one of them in Eau Claire, which
borders the Driftless Area. Two days be-
fore Election Day, he held a rally in Min-
neapolis, whose television market covers
a large swath of western Wisconsin.
Hillary Clinton was the first candi-
date of either party not to campaign in
Wisconsin since Richard Nixon in 1972.
But Clinton’s negligence was not the
only advantage Trump enjoyed. In 2011,
Walker had signed one of the strictest
voter-I.D. laws in the country, which was
blocked by the courts until shortly be-
fore the 2016 election. A survey conducted
by political scientists at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison estimated that,
of people in two of the state’s largest and
most heavily Democratic counties who
were eligible to vote but didn’t, ten per
cent had been deterred by the law. Trump
also benefitted from the growth and reach
of right-wing media. Researchers at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison found
that, by 2016, Wisconsin was being blan-
keted by conservative talk radio, aver-
aging nearly two hundred hours a day
statewide. At the same time, traditional
reporting is dying. In 2000, there were
twenty-one full-time reporters covering
state politics. Today, there are five.
Trump won almost all the counties
in the Driftless Area, but the 2018 mid-
terms proved that Wisconsin was not
yet a one-party state. Tony Evers, the
state’s superintendent of schools, defeated
Walker by twenty-nine thousand votes,
and Democrats won every statewide of-
fice. Evers’s victory was driven by highturnout in Milwaukee and Madison, but
also by better results in rural Wisconsin,
including in the Driftless Area, where
he won nearly half the counties. Evers,
who grew up in Plymouth, a small town
an hour north of Milwaukee whose motto
is “Cheese capital of the world,” cam-
paigned heavily in farm country. “Peo-
ple in rural Wisconsin care about schools,
health care, and good roads as much as
anybody else,” Evers told me. “Wiscon-
sin is the linchpin for both parties. If a
candidate can make inroads in rural Wis-
consin, they will definitely win.”T
he Statz Family Farm is on the
western edge of the Baraboo Hills,
a dramatic outcrop that straddles the
border of the Driftless Area. In 1972,
when Leon Statz was twelve years old,